The two boys have not been identified, but the report suggests that they are from the Panawahpskek Nation. According to the patrons, the boys ran toward the reservation. Overtown police are working closely with Island officers on the matter.

If you have any information about this crime, please contact the Overtown Police Department or the Office of Tribal Corrections.

I laughed, but I was angry, too. I ripped the story out, folded it up, and slid it in my pocket. I reached in the wood box and pulled out every local paper. One by one I crinkled up the “Crime and Court” page and put it in the woodstove and then neatly reorganized each newspaper and set them in the wood box. I took a front page and wrapped it around some kindling. I lit a match and touched it to the paper, and the fire crept and crept over the woman running on the front page, and I watched her disappear in the woodstove’s twisting flame. I took the fire poker and prodded the fire, which whooshed. I opened the damper and touched the warm cast iron.

I flicked on my bedroom light, and when I sat on the bed I saw it.

I got up. On top of my dresser stood a pack of cigarettes on top of a note. I held them. Winston 100s. I picked up the note. Mom’s handwriting.

Make them last, it read.

I folded the note and put it in my pocket with the news article. I undressed, turned my light off, and crawled under the covers. A small breeze slipped under the cracked window behind me and carried with it the sound of my mother’s laughter.

Half-Life

HALF-LIFE

It was Saturday. Early fall. I was sitting up, holding my head, and thinking about my grandmother for not too long before Fellis saw I was awake and asked me how we got down here, in one of the two tall silos at the blue abandoned Olamon Industries. Except for us and some dirt and blown wet leaves and crushed cans of cheap beer, the silos were empty. What light made its way this deep showed me my orange-colored hands. Rust from the ladder we’d used to get down here, and it was that ladder I wanted to say was how we got here, but that’s not what Fellis meant. The answer he sought had something to do with all the crushed beer cans. Or maybe it goes back further, has more to do with why we crushed those beer cans in the first place.

“Dee,” Fellis said. He stood now and brushed dirt off the back of his jeans. “Do you remember coming here?”

I was thinking too much into his question. All he wanted was a memory.

“I don’t remember,” I told him.

“Me fucking neither,” Fellis said.

I stood, and I rubbed my head and neck.